sweet cambodia

cambodians are so friendly. they are like the ontarians of asia. :)
my first day in cambodia was lovely. the sky is amazing! huge puffy white clouds. bright bright gorgeous blue skies. i never noticed, but india has no clouds. hmm. the capitol, phnom penh, besides using consonants with reckless abandon, is another french creation in south-east asia. hooray for french bread and cheese once again! yay! taxis are motorbikes. the country is famous, FAMOUS, for their scarves. thus i have lifted my self-imposed scarf ban and have permited myself to buy one. oops, i mean six. i've had drinks, meals, and colorful chats with locals. i haven't had such a nice welcome into local culture yet. people here speak english way better than in lao. the roads are better, too. well, i'm in the capitol i guess. that could explain it. am i using the right capitol? capital? i don't care. the buildings are beautiful.
i love cambodia, but my heart is broken and i am ready to leave this city. when i visited halifax, nova scotia with my parents in 2003, i spent an entire day bummed out after visiting the maritime museum and learning about the halifax explosion and the titanic clean-up crew. halifax has a sad history, yes. but NOTHING like cambodia. nothing. the civil war and khmer rouge are terrifying. we're talking 1975-1980-ish. i told my new cambodian friend, sarim, how excited i am to go home to my family reunion at the end of july. how i can't wait to see my grandparents. sarim told me he has no grandparents. no aunts. no uncles. they were all killed by the government in the late '70s. between 2 and 3 million cambodians (depending on who you ask) were killed during the war. that's close to 1/3 of the population. i visited the genocide museum, which was a torture prison until the '80s. there's still blood on the floor. there is still blood on the floor. the chains are still on the walls. pictures of the torture victims' corpses hang over their empty beds. it used to be a secondary school. the fact that the building used to be a school is just perverse. all the while walking through the place i kept repeating in my head "this was a school." the khmer rouge killed the intellectuals of cambodian society. i don't know. i love school. it seems sacrilegious, a torture prison made from a school. plus, as a grad school grad, it creeps me out that they hunted down and killed their educated citizens.
today i toured the mass grave sites just out of phnom penh. i rode a motorbike under those sparkly blue cambodian skies to fields filled with grassy green pits and lots of colorful butterflies. i stood in a small room filled with human skulls and looked at the clothes gathered from the shallow graves of the victims of the khmer rouge. i stood in front of the tree used for killing babies. the paths of the field are still littered with small bones and scraps of clothing. that's how recent this stuff is. i was walking on human bones this morning. and it was a beautiful day. i can't take this anymore. i can't type about this anymore.
sarim and i went for korean food for lunch.
tomorrow morning i'm off to siem riep to see angkor.